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Pinja Vincent, you wrinkly Phillips.

Welcome to the Blind Buy Podcast.

As I record this right now,

it's Tuesday the 5th of November, which means

I'm gonna go to bed tonight and then I get to wake up in the morning and find out who the new President of America is.

I'm not looking forward to that.

I'm not looking forward to waking up tomorrow morning

and reaching for my phone to find out.

It's an awful feeling.

I remember it from 2016.

I remember it from 2020.

That used to not be a feature of my life.

I used to not wake up in the morning, pick up a phone and then feel terrified to read the news.

What first triggered that fear?

January 2016.

I woke up, picked up my phone.

David Bowie's dead.

Out of nowhere.

David Bowie's dead.

Big shock.

Wasn't expecting it.

Massive Bowie fan.

One of those artists

where I could say that his music saved my life.

And what I mean by that is, when I was a teenager and I'd be going through bouts of severe depression or severe anxiety.

And I wouldn't have had the emotional maturity or tools to help myself.

I also happened to be like properly rediscovering the music of David Bowie.

I knew Bowie's music from my childhood because my brothers were listening to it.

But when I was like 17, once every two months I'd save up 25 euros and I'd buy a new David Bowie album on CD and only listen to that.

And that gave me that gave me a feeling of purpose, meaning and allowed me to to connect with my emotions.

When I was getting panic attacks for the first time and didn't know what they were or have any language for what they were and felt like I was dying frequently and listening to an album like Aladdin Sane having that to turn to

and to absorb myself in that literally saved my life so when David Bowie suddenly died in 2016 I experienced a shock and a complicated grief because his death brought me to a place in myself where I was very very vulnerable and raw so seeing Bowie's Bowie's death on my phone, just waking up and David Bowie's dead, that left

a little fear response in me.

And then six months later,

fucking Brexit, Brexit, I remember going to bed, going to bed and going, oh God,

I can't believe I'm going to wake up.

I'm going to wake up and find out

what the Brexit vote was.

And then I fearfully, I woke up, fearfully reached for my phone and opened it and looked at Sky News.

And it's David Cameron resigning.

And I'm like, you did fucking what?

You fucking mad English cunts.

You did fucking what?

Fucking Brexit.

Poor old Brits.

I really feel sorry for for...

I feel sorry for the people of

England, Scotland and Wales.

For that shit.

Like when I'm doing gigs, if I'm gigging, anywhere over there,

I'm just talking to the venue staff and they're like, yeah, we used to get a load of funding from the EU, but now that money doesn't exist anymore, and this venue is really struggling.

Brexit was so silly.

So we all have to go to bed tonight, to go to bed tonight.

And I'm going to wake up and find out who the new president of America is.

And it's either going to be

Kamala Harris.

who's going to do evil things while pretending that she's not doing evil things or Donald Trump who's going to do evil things while telling you that he's doing evil things.

And let's be realistic, a third-party candidate isn't going to get fucking nominated.

The system of American imperialism will continue.

What's been decided is the tone, the tone of how it will be continued.

Like my American listeners keep asking me why I haven't done a gig.

Like I haven't done a gig in America.

When was my last gig in America?

Los Angeles 2019.

Five years ago.

I gigged in Los Angeles in November 2019, which is the exact date and place where the events of Blade Runner take place.

And I had a wonderful time.

I loved being in Los Angeles.

But I was supposed to do another American tour.

Right now, this month, I was supposed to be doing an American tour.

A big one.

It was offered to me.

And I just said, no, no,

I'm not gigging in America while you're in the middle of an election.

Just not doing it.

It's too tense.

It'd be difficult to put on a good show.

I'm going to leave it a while before I go to America to do gigs.

Do you know?

I want to gig in.

I want to gig in fucking...

I want to see places.

I want to see Cincinnati.

I want to see Cleveland.

I want to see Pittsburgh.

I want to do gigs in all the places.

that once had thriving industrial centers in the middle of the 20th century and have since experienced a massive economic downturn.

And

I want to fetishize, I want to fetishize the America of my youth.

Like I want to go to Pittsburgh because of Flash Dance.

I love Flash Dance.

Flash,

it's a visually stunning film.

It is a visually stunning film.

I'll put Flash Dance on in the background.

There's beautiful shots of the city of Pittsburgh, this industrial city.

Steam rising from the steel plant and a loud color palette and grainy film.

I fucking love flash dance.

When I was a child in the 80s and 90s, Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Milwaukee.

You couldn't escape these names.

They were all over television.

These were important cities and films were made in them because they were full of people and prosperous.

I want to go to Cincinnati and eat a Cincinnati chili.

Looks like dog shit.

It's shit chili and a lot of spaghetti.

I don't care.

I want to eat one.

I've spent a disgraceful amount of time walking the streets of Cincinnati on Google Maps.

I fetishise

Pittsburgh and Cincinnati and Milwaukee.

I fetishize these places the way that Americans fetishize the West of Ireland.

And what I'm fetishizing here, it's the America of my youth.

You see, here's the thing.

If you're my age, if you're an elder millennial, I grew up with America being represented in films and television.

It was like a vision of heaven.

There was no internet.

The only America we saw was what was curated to us through films and television.

The only time I saw a skyscraper was on a film about America as a child.

I'd wait around for the bits in American films where they go to the supermarket.

just so I could see the big bags of crisps.

Like fucking home alone.

He was eating a giant tub of ice cream and a large packet of crisps.

We didn't have that.

We do now.

Now I can go to the supermarket and there's an entire aisle of crisps that are larger than my head.

That didn't exist when I was a child.

Hag and Dad's ice cream didn't exist.

Ice cream in a tub didn't exist when I was a child.

Ice cream came in a block.

And your ma had to cut it with a knife like it was an animal that she was killing.

Ice cream came in rectangles, in rectangles and it was just vanilla.

It was just vanilla.

That was it.

I'm talking late 80s, early 90s.

It was just vanilla.

Vienetta existed but realistically no one's eating fucking Vianetta.

That was too fancy.

It was at least 1995 before Vianetta stopped being that fancy.

And then you turn on home alone

and fucking Macaulay Culkin is sitting down.

With a bucket of hagandash.

There was no Google.

There was nothing.

couldn't you couldn't go to the library american films when i was a child it was a portal to heaven like what do you you have to ask your da da what's macaulay culkin eating

looks like a big bucket of ice cream what type of ice cream

i don't know because it's it's it's tv it's tv we can't rewind television and the ice cream's gone now You've just seen it for one second.

You saw

a three second clip of Macaulay Culkin eating a giant ice cream and now you're never going to see it again.

Maybe next year when they show the film on TV again at Christmas.

And the giant tub of American ice cream has to live in your head as this wonderful possibility of a thing that you can get in this magical land called America.

And when Americans would visit, if they came to Limerick, people would follow them around.

because the Americans had really clean white t-shirts and their denim jeans were different and their shoes were different.

Like I think I told you this before but when I was a child, when I was I was about six years of age my neighbors had American grandchildren that were my age and they would visit every summer.

So every summer I got to speak to American children and these American children who were my friends, who'd come every summer, they knew about Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

A year,

a year before we knew about Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

Even though Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles was actually being animated up in Dublin.

But I've definitely covered that in a podcast before.

But anyway, when I was a little child, these American children visited for the summer and they're talking to me about Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

And I'm like, what the fuck are they?

What the fuck are they?

And then they took out.

They had a little Donatello tie and a Michelangelo tie.

And I got to play with these turtles.

But the Turtles cartoon was an abstract concept.

It was a cartoon that was only being shown back in America.

So they had to describe to me.

They had to say, well, this one's Michelangelo and this one's Donatello.

But there's other ones, but we don't have those ties of fucking Leonardo and Raphael.

And there's a rat called Splinter.

And they had to describe the Turtles universe to me.

And I'd no way of seeing it.

And then when they left and went back to America, and the turtles didn't exist in Ireland yet, do you know what I did?

I got snails.

I got real snails from out my back garden and painted bandanas on their shells and named them Donatello and Michelangelo and whatever the fuck have you.

And I played turtles with real snails with painted shells and waited until turtles came out here in Ireland like a couple of months later.

I'm not even sure what point I'm trying to make, lads.

When I was growing up, America was a very special place.

Everything was bigger.

Everything was better.

They had more money.

The films came out first.

Fashion came out first.

Music came out there first.

The internet didn't exist.

So America was a fantasy.

It was

an advanced alien civilization.

And if you were lucky enough, the aliens would come down and visit.

and tell you about things like teenage mutant ninja turtles or tell you about giant ice creams and gigantic bags of crisps.

Giant bags of crisps.

The ones that are bigger than your head.

These used to only exist in American films.

Doritos.

Doritos.

They only existed in American films and you had to imagine what they tasted like or maybe you were a friend who went on holidays to America and they had to describe the taste of a Dorito to you.

There was no online.

You couldn't go and buy Doritos and have them sent to Ireland.

That was unthinkable.

Our crisps came in tiny packets.

I remember my first packet of relatively large crisps.

And I don't mean the big giant packets, the big giant American packets that we have now as standard, but just slightly larger packet of crisps.

They were crinkle cut, ready salted, and they cost 50p.

It was about 19.92.

And my older brother worked in Dunn stores.

And one night he he was working in there late after it was closed, packing shelves.

And they got in these new

crinkle-cut crisps in a slightly larger packet, and he brought a packet home to me.

And he woke me up in bed at like 12 o'clock at night to feed me ready salted crisps from a large packet.

And I ate them feeling like an American.

And the packet of these crisps,

this is true, this is all 100% true.

The packet of these crisps

was so fancy that my ma wouldn't throw it away, and she put my sandwiches for school the next day into this fancy crisp packet.

And I remember that because

I remember being in the schoolyard taking out this packet of crisps, and then like three or four people around me reaching their hand into the packet of crisps to get a crinkle-cut fucking crisp,

and

all they get is a shitty little ham sandwich.

I've got listeners to this podcast who are 20.

I'm just trying to explain what it used to be like.

I need to, I feel like

I'm at an age.

I'm at an age where

I'm young enough that I can do a podcast where I've got 20-year-olds listening, but I'm old enough, I remember the world before the internet.

And I need to tell you what it was like because it's getting to the point where people don't believe it and before the internet america was a magic it was a fucking different planet full of aliens it was a genuinely magical place and you only experienced what was curated to you that was it and the great lie and illusion of america was curated through the propaganda of film and TV and we lapped it up.

I remember being a child, there was a TV show called Moesha

and

everyone in Ireland and probably England too,

you just watched Moesha on the TV.

It was a sitcom.

It was a sitcom aimed at young teenagers or kids and it was shown every day on TV and it was about a girl called Moesha who lives with her family in America.

Moesha was huge, absolutely massive.

Everybody looked at it.

But we had no idea that the actress who played Moesha was a gigantic singer in America called Brandy.

Absolutely huge.

Number one albums in America.

We didn't know.

We had no way of knowing.

Her music wasn't being played in Ireland or in England.

How could we know?

How would we possibly know?

I'd need to meet a human being who also knew that.

I couldn't read about it online.

There was no online.

Like imagine watching a TV show and Ariana Grande is a character on the TV show and you have no idea whatsoever that she has a gigantic pop career in America.

Just no idea.

She's just an actress on television.

And if you're a music fan, I strongly recommend listening to Brandy's first album, self-titled album.

It's from 1994.

I think she was only 13 when she released it.

It's one of the best R ⁇ B albums of all time.

And you don't even have to like R ⁇ B if you're a musician.

It's one of the most beautifully produced and engineered RB albums, full fucking stop.

Incredible album.

But this was the world before the internet.

This is the world before

you could answer any question you wanted about anything.

And I kind of miss it because

you had to use your imagination.

You had to imagine.

I remember again before the internet.

I remember seeing a Topac CD, seeing a Topak CD in the local music shop.

It was behind glass.

And seeing this Topac CD and thinking, wow, he looks like a cool rapper, this Topac fella.

It was a shop in Limerick called Empire Music on O'Connell Street.

It was the only shop in Limerick where you could buy rap music.

The rap music was kept behind glass and there was only ever about 50 C D's.

And at any one time, you could only ever see the the front cover of 10 of those C D's.

And I'd go there every week and I'd stare at those CDs.

For maybe an hour, I'd stare at those C D's because there was no internet.

And there was one Tupac CD called All Eyes on Me and a black background, and Tupac is just there sitting on a chair, looking like the coolest fucker in the whole world.

But that CD is an American import.

It's like £30.

So I had to save up my money for months to get £30

and then buy the Tupac CD.

But for months and months and months, I had to imagine what Topac's music was like.

Topac wasn't played on the radio in Ireland.

His music videos weren't played on TV.

You had to exist in a world where Topac didn't really exist.

I'd never heard of Topac.

It's here's all the rap C D's, and that one there looks like the coolest one.

And something I miss about that is

it made art

almost religious.

When it comes to film TV music, you can kind of consume whatever you want instantly now.

And that does devalue art.

But when all you've got is this C D behind glass with one photograph of a fella called Tupac and you don't know what he sounds like but you know he looks cool and for four months all I'm thinking about is I wonder what he sounds like.

That elevates that that C D.

It becomes a fucking relic.

It becomes a religious item.

It becomes an object of obsession, of imagination.

And every week I'm going back to the CD shop going, I hope no one bought the 2-pack CD.

I hope no one else wants it.

And then finally I buy it.

And it's like a religious experience.

And I know you might be thinking, ah, come on, blindboy.

Surely you could have asked them to play you the 2-pack CD in the fucking record shop.

No.

So in the old days, the facility did exist.

to walk into a music shop and say, I'd like to buy this CD, can I hear it first?

Most places would do that for people, but not if you were a child.

They wouldn't do it for a child.

And

the wrap CDs were US imports.

The record shop had to go out of their way at greater expense to bring these CDs in from America.

So they were all wrapped in plastic and they were a lot more expensive than regular CDs.

So if I said, I want to hear that 2-pack CD, They're not going to break the seal to play it for me.

Come on, blindboy, they must have been playing 2-pack on the radio in 1996.

No, no they were not.

They were not playing Tupac on the radio in 1996.

After Tupac died in 1998 then they played the song Changes on the radio a couple of times and rap music did not become mainstream in Ireland until the year 2000 after Eminem's song Stan and I remember because I was there and all the people in school who used to take the piss out of me for listening to rap music all of a sudden wanted a loan of my Snoop Dogg CDs.

so look this is why i fetishize cincinnati this is why i fetishize cincinnat and milwaukee i'm old enough to remember fetishizing america as

an alien advanced civilization that could never be touched a perfect heaven full of rap music and giant ice cream and giant crisps and skyscrapers and no night gares and clean white t-shirts and places called Pittsburgh with steel factories and steam rising against a blood orange sunset.

And I remember the moment when that all ended, when the veneer lifted.

The moment when America became something you could touch.

And it was in 1995.

The Simpsons episode, Who Shot Mr.

Barnes?

It's the very, very famous Simpsons episode where they ended a season on a cliffhanger.

Okay?

mr barn was shot at the end of season five i know what the fuck season seven mr burns was shot and they left us on a cliffhanger and we had to guess who shot mr barn and this was huge and we waited an entire year

who shot mr barns we waited a fucking year

And then

the new season of The Simpsons came out on TV and then it's revealed.

Maggie shot Mr.

Burns.

Could have never have guessed it.

Maggie, the baby, shot Mr.

Burns.

My god.

But the next day on the radio, I vaguely remember this because I was a child.

I remember my older brothers talking about it.

The next day on the radio in Ireland,

after we found out that Maggie shot Mr.

Burns,

there were big arguments on the radio.

I think it was the Joe Duffy show.

There was big, big arguments on talk radio in Ireland because what had happened was

these two lads in Dublin I think

had put a huge bet with Paddy Power that Maggie had shot mr.

Barnes and they won a lot of money and Paddy Power had given them really good odds because the idea that Maggie was the one who shot Mr.

Barnes that was nuts so Paddy Power gave huge odds and the lads won a ball of cash but

and this is the first time I ever heard the word the internet so a few months previously Dublin had opened Ireland's first ever internet cafe

in those days if you wanted the internet

in those days if you wanted the fucking internet

you'd to walk into a place called an internet cafe where they would have a computer and then you'd give the computer money and you'd get to use the internet for an hour and nobody knew what the internet was.

So anyway, these two fucking lads in Dublin,

they had used this new thing called the internet in an internet cafe to go onto the internet

to find out that Maggie had shot Mr.

Barnes because the episode aired in America like a week beforehand and the Dublin lads went onto a Simpsons forum or they spoke to someone in America.

but then they went oh okay Maggie shot Mr.

Barnes let's go to Paddy Power and rip him off and it worked and there was a huge big debate about this.

What do you mean you used the computer to look into the future?

People couldn't understand it.

People didn't, and that was the moment that this ended.

That's when the era of cultural scarcity ended.

Not ended, but began.

And as the internet

started to creep and bleed into our lives,

everything got a little bit closer and smaller.

So from about 1998,

By 98

everyone knew what the internet was and some people even had it in their houses on their home computers.

I didn't get a PC and the internet until 2001.

But in the period that the internet started to expand

what you also had was

the rise of globalization.

Globalization is a word you hear a lot.

The latter half of the 20th century was about the Cold War.

The two great superpowers.

You had capitalism, which was led by America.

Then you had communism, which was led by the Soviet Union and all the countries that it influenced.

That was the Cold War.

In 1989, the Soviet Union fell and capitalism won.

America became the only global superpower.

So leading up to the fall of the fucking Berlin Wall in 1989, so leading up to the collapse of the Soviet Union and afterwards,

capitalism no longer had a competing ideology.

So capitalism became unfettered.

So globalization is from the 1990s onwards, advancements in, we'll say, technology, transport, faster communication with the internet.

This greatly increased the speed and volume of the trade of goods across borders across the world and then with the fall of the Soviet Union now you've got a big chunk of Eastern Europe and Asia now open to the free market open to exploit their resources you had organizations like the World Trade Organization or treaties like the like NAFTA liberalizing

the free movement of goods between countries you've got the European Union liberalizing and making it real easy to move goods between countries nice and cheaply so that there is globalization right

and to simplify it by 1999

i'm able to buy doritos in limerick in limerick i can go to the shop and buy a giant bag of doritos like i live in america eight years previously early 90s i'm looking at home alone and giant bags of doritos and big fucking tubs of hagandaz they may as well exist on mars now they're in Dunn stores in Limerick in 1999.

So that there is the that's the process of globalization.

But now I can't fetishize America anymore.

Now America doesn't seem as magical anymore because I've got Doritos in my local shop.

And then after 9-11, after 9-11, everybody has the internet.

And now we can use the internet.

Like from 2002 onwards.

We're seeing America.

We're seeing videos of America.

What America is actually like on the ground.

Like I remember probably 2003, don't know what the website was, some

just some discussion board.

Like Reddit, but not Reddit.

Just being able to watch real Americans talk or talk to Americans on the internet in the early 2000s.

And being like, oh my good God, you're so racist.

All you're doing is complaining about black people and using the N-word.

What the fuck is this?

This wasn't in home alone.

But for me personally, and I'm guessing other people my age, who grew up with the the highly curated, wonderful version of of America that's only portrayed in film and television, and then to also come of age and to see actual America and speak to real Americans and see images and videos of actual America on the internet in the early 2000s and and to be exposed to

a grimy, gritty,

the underbelly of

poverty and inequality

and

hearing stories about people who have to sell their cars because they got cancer.

I'm following a feeling this week.

I'm not too sure why I'm speaking about this stuff, but I'm following a feeling, which is what I always do.

And I think what the feeling is, it's hovering around the concept of make America great again.

But because I grew up in Ireland, seeing the greatness of America portrayed to me in a hyper-real fashion purely through films and television, it's easy for me to see that Make America Great Again is a fucking myth.

And those cities that I keep mentioning there

Milwaukee, Cincinnati, Pittsburgh.

I know the names of these cities because the TV and films that I was exposed to as a child in the 80s and 90s, these cities were a big deal.

I also know these cities because when I was a child, I fucking adored my World Book encyclopedias.

I was so fortunate to grow up in a house where we had a full collection of encyclopedias, even though they were from 1976.

But me, as a young autistic child, my fucking best friends

was a full alphabet of World Book encyclopedias.

Hours and hours as a child just looking through these encyclopedias.

Let's open D today.

Let's open E or F.

But I remember, I remember like Detroit, fucking Cincinnati, Pittsburgh.

They had the biggest articles in these encyclopedias.

They had like 25 page long articles dedicated to these cities because they were so important and they were so prosperous and they were so wealthy because the fucking encyclopedia was printed in the mid 70s.

These cities were the industrial heartland of America.

They were around the Great Lakes area.

After World War II in America these cities were where steel was being processed, there were cars were being made, massive massive industry and huge employment for a massive working class in America where people had unions

and job security and you had a wealthy working and middle class who had very good quality lives, millions of people, and Trump's Make America Great Again message.

He harks back to that in a mythological way.

He says to Americans, We're gonna bring back American jobs.

He'll go to Cincinnati and say, We're gonna bring the industry back.

We're gonna make cars here again.

We're gonna make soap here again.

There's gonna be jobs.

And it's appealing to people who remember their working working-class parents and grandparents, having solid careers, healthcare, unions, and being able to afford houses.

But it's neoliberalism and globalization that killed all that.

Those jobs went to emerging economies in the global south where people can be completely exploited due to a lack of labor regulations.

And now we have all the choice that you could want in a home alone movie, but no jobs, no unions, no home ownership.

The shit that used to be

cheap is now expensive, and the shit that used to be expensive is now cheap.

Housing, education, health care in most capitalist economies in the global north, these things

fifty, sixty years ago, those things used to be affordable.

Housing, healthcare, education used to be affordable for working class and middle class people.

What was really expensive were things like washing machines, video recorders, televisions, appliances.

These things used to be mad expensive.

Like just look at any game show.

Look at any game show in either America, Ireland, whatever, from like the 80s.

Look at the prizes they're giving away on the game shows.

Washing machines, VCRs, TVs.

Because those things were fucking mad expensive.

When they broke, you got them repaired.

You kept them for years because they were being made by people who were being paid properly and had workers' rights.

Now appliances like washing machines or fucking TVs they're so cheap that people will just buy a new one rather than get them fixed because they're being made in China or Pakistan where workers are exploited and then those goods can travel freely through borders via globalization and we get them nice and cheap but education, healthcare and housing They're now all at the at the mercy of the speculative forces of the market.

These are now these are are assets that investment funds invest in.

So now these things are mad expensive.

Donald Trump's not going to fix any of that.

I don't think Kamala Harris is either.

Because it's a global system now.

It's a fucking global system.

A system which is...

It's rewarding billionaires.

It's rewarding billionaires and it's creating more billionaires.

And Ireland isn't helping any of it because this is where billionaires come to wash their dirty money and not pay any tax.

I think what I'm teasing at with that geriatric millennial rant.

Something about Make America Great again

and my fetishization

of like Cincinnati and Milwaukee.

They're two sides of the same kind.

I want to visit these cities so I can feel the the the fetishized America of my youth.

The one that I saw in Flash Dance or the one that I saw in Home Alone, which is Chicago, I think.

I'm looking for a nostalgic comfort of fake America that was sold to me through films.

And I think that's what the people who...

Aside from being fucking giant racists, I don't want to leave that one out.

Make America great again, people.

They just want to be able to...

They want to say the N-word out loud.

They want their old neighborhoods that used to be full of white people to be white again.

Aside from that hatred, what they actually fucking want is a bit of socialism.

The great America they're thinking back to, of industrial cities where people had jobs.

That environment is hostile to completely unfettered capitalism because their grandparents had workers' rights, unions, health care, collective bargaining, strikes, and an ethos that the collective of the workers

is powerful and that the capitalist factory owners should fear the workers.

That's all socialism and Donald Trump isn't going to give you that.

I saw a very sad story during the week about a racist Trump supporter.

I don't know if you remember 2017 the Unite the Right rally.

I believe a woman died at it after

a right-wing protester drove to her crowd with a car.

But the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.

It was a really depressing and frightening rally where

a lot of fascists got together to unite and they all held tiki torches they marched with torches and it was very disgusting and frightening because

it reminded everyone of Nazi rallies fucking Klu Klux Klan rallies it wasn't nice and a lot of photographs of those racists

they went viral at the time holding their tiki torches It was 2017.

And one of these viral images of these white angry fascists with with their tiki torches marching together.

There was a fat on one of those images

and just a few months ago I think he died by suicide.

He'd five children, big racist Trump supporter, hated immigrants.

He lived in Arizona near the border with Mexico.

But he took his own life because he got caught smuggling fentanyl across the border from Mexico into the United States, using his whiteness and his citizenship and the privilege that goes with it to zip back and forth unfettered over the Mexican and American border with fentanyl knowing that it's highly unlikely he's ever going to get caught because he's white and he's a US citizen.

He was getting paid only 250 quid a trip from the Mexican mafia and then eventually he gets caught.

He got caught doing it.

He became everything that he was angry about.

It became his fantasy of the criminal, criminal immigrants crossing crossing the border bringing their crime.

He became the fantasy of what he hated and the shame of it was so great when he got caught and his name got out.

He took his own life and also how desperate must he have been to have five kids and to be smuggling fentanyl across the border for 250 quid a pop.

I haven't a clue who I'm gonna wake up to in the morning as fucking American president.

I honestly cannot call it.

I cannot call it at all.

If I have any listeners in Cincinnati or Milwaukee, will you make yourself known to me, please?

Or Pittsburgh?

Because if I do do an American tour at some point, those are the cities I want to visit so I can get a glimpse of the America that I remember from my youth on the television.

Another thing with globalization is everything is looking the exact same.

I was in a shopping mall in Toronto last year and I was on tour.

Might as well have been Limerick.

Everyone wearing the exact same clothes, the exact same shops, the body shop, Starbucks, an Apple store that looks the exact same as an Apple store in Ireland, and now buildings look the exact same all over the world too.

If you go to any place in America, Canada, Australia, where there's new builds, everything looks the exact same because of a thing called rain screen cladding.

Look up rain screen cladding building.

All architecture is becoming homogenized.

The materials are becoming homogenized.

Rain screen cladding is.

You'll know it when you see it, but it's like a modern building and it looks like it's made out of Lego.

I walked around the city in Ohio on Google Maps.

A city called Dublin.

Dublin, Ohio.

Because I was curious.

I'm like, I want to see what this place called Dublin looks like in America.

I walked around fucking Dublin, Ohio.

which is a city that's only seen a population growth in the past 20 years.

And it might as well have been any part of Dublin that's been Dublin, Ireland

that's been built up since the Celtic Tiger.

Or it could have been anywhere in London that's been built up in the past 20 years.

Everything is homogenized.

This is turning into a phone call podcast.

I didn't intend this to be a phone call podcast at all.

I wanted to read you a short story this week.

That's why I didn't have a hot take prepared.

I had no hot take prepared because I wanted to read you a short story.

My book Topographia Hibernica came out this time last year.

but the paperback, the paperback version of Topographia Hibernica, it's out today in bookshops.

It's my collection of short stories, which I poured my heart and soul into over two years of writing.

And

that was externally rewarded because it became a bestseller and it got really, really good reviews.

That's nice.

It's nice, but it's not important.

What's important is

I enjoyed writing the book and I can stand over the work.

That's what's important.

Whether critics like it or they don't or whether it sells well or it doesn't, those things are just nice.

Those are nice things and isn't that lovely but they're not important.

After the Ocarina pause I'm gonna read you

a short story called Ratworm Lung.

It's written in quite a detailed third-person prose.

It's a story about a man who eats slugs and it's quite surreal.

But when I write surrealism, I don't get magical.

I try to keep everything within the rules of possibility.

So even though the short story is quite surreal and fantastical at times,

everything's grounded in reality.

This could actually happen.

But we'll do it.

We'll do an ocarina pause first before I read this short story.

Here's some fucking some fucking adverts.

This prick of an ocarina.

It's my big fat ocarina.

There you go.

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It's Stock Up September at Whole Foods Market.

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The Dog-Friendly Bay Socarina.

Doesn't have much range,

but

it's quite pleasurable.

I enjoy it.

Support for this podcast comes from you, the listener, via the Patreon page, patreon.com forward slash the blind boy podcast.

If you enjoy this podcast, if it brings you mirth, merriment, distraction, entertainment, whatever the fuck, please consider paying me for the work that I put into this podcast.

Because this is my this is my full-time job, it's how I earn a living, it's how I rent out my office, it's how I pay for all my equipment, it's how I

my electricity bills, it's how I feed myself.

This is my actual full-time job.

So if you enjoy the work that I'm doing, please consider paying me.

all I'm looking for is the price of a pint or a cup of coffee once a month that's it and if you can't afford that don't worry about it you can listen for free listen for free because the person who is paying is paying for you to listen for free patreon.com forward slash the blind by podcast and i would like to remind you if you're becoming a new a new patron please don't sign up on the on the Patreon app on your iPhone because Apple are dirty bastards and starting this November if you were to sign up to my Patreon and give me the price of a pint using the Patreon app on your iPhone Apple are going to take 30% of that.

They're going to take 30%

and then Patreon take another 30% I think leaving me with just a few sips of that coffee or pint.

So if you'd like to subscribe to my Patreon, just go to patreon.com forward slash the blind by podcast.

Try and do it on a desktop if you can.

And also become a paid subscriber, please, because Patreon will give the option to be a free subscriber.

That only benefits Patreon, that gives you

your data, but it doesn't give me any money.

But by all means, still listen for free.

There's just no incentive to subscribe to Patreon for free.

That just benefits a company called Patreon.

So, gigs,

my gigantic UK tour, June 25.

Bristol, Cornwall, Sheffield,

Glasgow, Edinburgh, York, London, Norwich.

And there's some other place.

Bex Hill, Manchester.

I'm doing loads of gigs.

Go to fan.co.uk forward slash blindboy for the full list of gigs on my UK tour.

Come along to that.

That's going to be tremendous fun.

I can't wait for that.

Vicar Street in a couple of weeks on the 19th of november that now i think that's sold out now i think that's possibly sold out sometimes people give tickets back so you could still chance it but i didn't anticipate that many people wanting tickets and i want to make sure people still get a gig so i'm going to add a second vicar street show on the 27th of january So if you couldn't get tickets for that Dublin gig on the 19th of November, I'll put a second show on the 27th of January 2025.

And then look February 25, Leisureland up in Galway, Crescent Hall in Drahada and the Waterfront Theatre in Belfast.

So that's enough gig plugging.

I'd like to read you this short story

which is from my book Topographia Hibernica.

Paperback is out today.

You can get it if you like.

I loved writing this story.

I fucking adored writing this story.

I think I I spent, geez, nearly two months writing this story, which meant I spent two months

living in this character's world.

And when I was saying there,

it doesn't matter, it doesn't really matter how the book was received.

What matters to me is the process of writing.

What makes me feel warm and fuzzy and gives me meaning is thinking about the the time I spent writing this story, living in this world and having

the story reveal itself to me through flow like a waking dream.

I wrote this story in a very detailed third-person prose.

Writing this felt like painting a massive painting where every single brushstroke has purpose and intent.

If I was to see this story as a painting, it would be a big hieronymous Bosch style triptitch.

I was reading a lot of James Joyce around the time that I was writing this, in particular James Joyce's short story, The Dead, which I did an entire podcast on about two years ago.

So the prose of the dead definitely guided me when I was writing this story.

And I don't want to spoil it for you.

This is a fucking 10,000 word story about a man who eats slugs.

A man called Jupan, who at one point in his life was admired by all the women in the town.

And now he eats slugs.

And I loved living in this world for two months.

So here's a crack at it.

And you don't have to listen to it if you don't want to.

You just got 47 minutes of a phone call there.

So if listening to short stories isn't your thing, you can just check out now.

That's no problem.

But for those who do want to hear a short story, this one is called Rat Long Worm.

Jup Holihan had been a fancy man to the women of Tarlas in his time.

They went arseways for his Greek squint and the streak of Kevin Costner's jaw under his teeth.

He had a wardrobe pregnant with Ben Sharman shirts that glistened like a pack of fruit pastels.

Every weekend, he'd pick a new colour and drape it over his shoulders, his television presenter's shoulders.

A hungry head of hair for eating tubes of brill cream, above in Coco's paradise, the local disco on a small stretch of floorboards, atop a bar and grill.

It's an Aldi now, but it was a temple of sound back then.

It had a tropical theme in the time of line dancing.

The fingers of Tharless, reaching through the pink flashing cloud of a fog machine, to touch the tribal tattoo on Jupe's tricep once the shirt came off.

He was the child of Prague on a horn.

Arms the guards wouldn't dig out of a shinner's back garden.

His arse too.

None of this gym shit.

Pumped up from when they used to pay a ten or a brick on the building sites.

A Jack Russell's arse fighting to get out of the stonewashed 501s.

The women of Tharlis would rest their Bacardi breezers on it.

And fuck me, could he line dance?

Didn't matter what the DJ threw at him.

Could be Garf Brooks.

Could be Gigi D'Agostino.

He had his own way of line dancing.

A flamenco flare.

A cowboy on a beach he was.

Doing a sailor step shuffle on stabby patent shoes that could burst the balloon just by tipping off the gossamer of it.

Shirt floorwards and a Bruce Willis vest with crystals of odorless sweat giving him big red fireplace nipples.

Effortless pull-ups on the fire exit, so you'd see the fur of his Europop oxers, topless and shining, the din of links, tobacco on the bollocks, no selfies.

Your head was the camera back then.

Famished gants dripping from here to Ben Bulbin and back in a devil's echo.

Other men would hide behind the car parked bins, breastfeeding their pints just to watch him barnacle the women of Tharlis buckled on the bonnet of his Toyota Salika.

And now look at him.

Over in the cul-de-sac, a terror to the slugs with salt.

Heineken and Kebabs hadn't been kind to Jope in the twenty odd years that followed.

He rode the back off the Celtic tiger, but the recession had the baitin' of him.

He'd glared into too many blue sparks from a welder's torch, and his eyesight wasn't the best.

His chubby heart would flutter at a flock of seagulls slicing through the moonlight that he mistook for a meteor shower, panging for a hot orange rock of luck.

There'd been money in laying bricks and he even swung a jab at being a property developer, but lost it all to a timeshare in Belarus, scammed by a plastic-chinned economist from RTE.

No family to speak of.

Jupiter never landed a solid woman, and he was in his fuck looking for one now.

Sure, why would anyone take him in this state?

And wouldn't the rejection be a disrespect to his younger self?

Wouldn't it be better to exist as a memory in their heads?

At least he held on to the pebble dash bungalow in the cul-de-sac, but it was forever condemned to be a bachelor's hall.

You couldn't draw in a woman with an uninsulated crawl space attic.

The mania of a tall hedge, an ivy sucking all the light from the windows.

A woman would walk across his cul-de-sac and never know it was there.

Jope was tucked away under a brick in the dark, only crawling out for shopping and Tuesday's doll.

He stuck himself to the walls of the bungalow.

They knew more about him than he knew about himself.

He had become invisible.

The ivy brought wildlife after the rain, himself and the long olive slugs of the back porch, ozing up from the dirt in their hundreds and laying disco-like trails across the decking.

And nights of Heineken, he was king of the slugs.

Seldom and Gamara, they were devoted to him.

Ye can have the lagger or ye can have the salt, he'd splutter.

And they'd fizzle or fatten depending on his mood.

Big hieronymous Bosh head on him.

They were fucked either way.

In their hour of judgment, he'd wash the slithery cunts away with a roar of awkward piss from his manhood, chomping bites at the teal steam of his voice darting up in the dark, taking gullible words back.

And if the whiskey from Aldi was involved, well, he might pick up a slug and slide it down his tongue.

Then imagine himself as a fuchsia-shirted property developer, perched over on the stool of an oyster bar in Heathrow Airport Lounge, laughing with the pebble dash gable wall like it was an aisle sheik on a flight to Riyadh.

This life that had nearly been in his fists, directing torrents of fizzy champagne piss up up towards his lips, splashing it on himself, despising himself.

Sure, who'll be looking?

Slugs are the oysters of the porch when your eyes are gammy with whiskey on board.

And then would come the line dancing in the warmth of the bungalow.

The phone sat in the teacup, reverberating Garth Brooks through the kitchen, groaning over the gas hob, while Jupes withering kneecaps did their best through denim on the lino,

and fifty-minute floppy wanks to the Salica bonnet lickouts in the car park of Coco's paradise before he lost himself to the inevitable suffering of existence.

With a pepperami of a langer and a mankey snows in the acrylic recliner, he laid bricks in his dreams and all the slugs were gone by dawn back into the concrete like slimy fairies.

The next morning He'd suck a silk cut and stare at their parly trails and his head would be transported back to the kebab boxes that littered car parks on the Sunday after a serious night on the dance floor.

He'd take that over this in a pulse.

The sun didn't spove at this hour.

It let him know that his tribal tattoo was melting green around a sprawl of lavender veins.

And they don't really sell joke anymore.

And these no fucking aftershafes smell like a grapefruit's fanny.

The music they have today is the aborted heartbeat of his unborn child.

You couldn't line dance to it if you tried.

According to Dr.

Kiley with the bacon and cabbage face, the slugs were how he contracted ratworm lung disease, angiostrongylis, cantonensis, a desperately rare affliction.

The doctor had to drag the information out of him, asking mad intrusive questions like: Have you visited the tropics at any point?

The Polynesian archipelagos, or Hawaii at all?

Have you had any reason to drink rain water, Mr.

Holan?

Have you consumed unwashed lettuce, maybe?

This is very important for your prognosis, Mr.

Holan.

I need to know if you have ever, intentionally or unintentionally, eaten a live slug.

Jope lied and said that he was forced to eat a slug by the continuity IRA who had hunted him down after he caught them raping a postman.

The doctor made a face.

Jope was fond of a good lie, like being best friends with Pat Kenny, or being born in Portugal, or finding a dog collar that can turn their barks into words.

You'd take his stories with a lick of salt.

But this story was different, this one was real.

He practised it to the gable wall, so that it wouldn't sound like one of his lies.

There's a parasite, an exclusive tropical parasite, he'd say.

A rat-lung worm, they call it.

You get it from slugs.

The rat gets the worm from eating a slug and the infected rat passes the worm in his droppings and a slug eats those droppings so the parasite is in a new slug which is eaten by another rat and it goes on and on and on like that forever until a human disturbs the cycle.

And I won't tell you how I disturbed that cycle but now the rat lung worm is inside me and it's travelling up towards the lining of my brain.

There's no cure for it.

It's too rare, too special.

He'd always thought it would be the whiskey in the recliner that would kill him in the end.

But the truth of it was,

he had a queer excitement about the rat longworm.

God was shining a torch into his shit eyes.

It was the most interesting thing to happen to him since the nineties.

It was a movie star's malady.

Type of disease Keanu Reeves would get.

Jope's favourite villain was Speed.

He'd watch it on tape and feel the blood hot in his throat over the mad bus with a bomb that would blow up if the bus ever slowed down.

And he worshipped the ankles of Sandra Bullock.

He'd see himself and Sandra Bullock eatin' water the oysters in the departure lounge of Heathrow Airport.

She'd run her fingernails through his full head of hair and they'd laugh about getting oyster juice in his curls.

And back in the porch the oyster was a slug and Sandra Bullock was the moon.

And now he felt like the bus in speed.

And the rat lung worm was the time bomb, ready to blow his head open if he ever slowed down.

And sweet mother of fuck was he lonely in the cul-de-sac.

But the rat-lung worm climbed into his heart for a while and made it beat faster.

He named the worm Vincent Melrose, which was what he'd want to be named if he hadn't been christened Seamus Holihan.

Jup didn't stop eating the slugs either.

He'd wither them with salt and let them sparkle the death in his jowls.

And the glamour of the disease restored a strain of confidence that stretched above the back porch, over the bony alleys and ghost estates as far as the Barras and O Mountains.

He began to venture beyond the bungalow and slither up into the bowels of Tarless Town.

He'd developed a way of walking, which wasn't quite walking and wasn't quite line dancing, but an agreement between the two.

The worm told him to put on his old Ben Sharman shirts, even with the belly roaring to get out from under the buttons.

Stonewashed five hundred ones having a nervous nervous breakdown around his crotch.

The muffin-top love handles blushing pink against the tipper area wind.

And brill cream sliding through his silver hairs.

A man who knew what he wanted for breakfast.

And off to the car park of Aldi he'd go and say to anyone who'd listen, Did you know this place used to be Coco's paradise?

I've a worm in my head that'll kill me.

He expected surprise.

To be treated as an exotic novelty, an expensive parrot, someone who'd inspired distant adoration, but instead, he got pity.

Oh, you poor man, Jesus Jope, if there's anything you need, let me know, they'd say.

And Tharlis' town was humming with stories of poor Jope Holihan, above in the cul-de-sac with the parasite.

An online donation page was launched on Jope's behalf by Dickie Harlehy, the Hyundai salesman on the Dublin Road.

A fiver here and fifty Euro there.

The memories of Jope commanding the dance floor in the the days of Coco's paradise was enough to stir a nostalgic generosity in the middle-aged hearts of Tharless.

The bones of 8,000 Euro was raised.

The cheque flew in the letterbox of the bungalow one morning.

A warm bubble of gratitude fought to expand in his belly, but then he felt embarrassed, or belittled, or ashamed, and Dickie Harley was only a show-off, with his Hyundai dealership.

And Jup remembers, like it was yesterday, when Dickie would go red in the face talking to women and copying his dance moves with a tiny priest's arse under the Wranglers.

And Jope hated every single person who donated that money and he hated himself even more for needing it.

Madeira cakes were left at his door, mass cards dedicated to Saint Vitus.

He hadn't seen this much attention since 1996.

And the women of Tharlis were back at the porch like the slugs.

Women with haircuts and slabs of husbands.

Nessa, Noreen, Maude Cleary, Julia Feeney, Agnes Burke.

Women who'd known the cherry-coloured bonnet of his Toyota Salika, who had shouted, Come inside me, Jope, go harder.

Drive right into the back where the sticky buns are.

In the time when condoms were for Protestants, long before husbands are haircuts.

Sure he couldn't bring that up now.

Even Mary Crawford visited his door.

A regular fling from Cocos.

A bit more than a fling, really.

He'd have nearly called her a girlfriend.

And she still had the delicate neck, but the eyes that were once bowl like a cat's had a concern in them.

She talked with her teeth and said, Is it growing inside you, Joe?

Is it really in your brain?

He avoided the question and said, I was cursed with the bland hair, Mary.

It always thins on you, half expecting a compliment.

And Mary looked up at his sweating scalp on top of his squint and noticed the sour smell of yesterday's drink on his breath, then changed the subject.

You still have the line dancing, Seamus.

Joe puffed back his shoulders, sucked in the gut and gave her a wink.

I know, Mary, you wouldn't have brought that up if you didn't remember.

Line dancing is the vertical expression of a horizontal desire.

Come in past the hallway, and we'll grapevine and pivot to a bit of Billy Ray Cyrus.

Mary took a step back, and her eyes scanned over the ivy that was eating the bungalow.

I don't know why I'm here, to be honest, Seamus.

I wouldn't say that I care about you.

I wouldn't say that you even enter my head for that matter.

But I took that ferry to Liverpool.

And you're the only person who knows that.

My husband doesn't know.

And I think about that.

I think about it every single day.

And I suppose I'm never free of you because of it.

And I felt some obligation to check in now that you're sick.

This isn't about you or even me.

I'm doing it for someone else.

Juke made a face that let Mary know that he had forgotten about all that business because it wasn't very important to him.

He closed the door on her and found himself in the hallway and said to nobody, Three o'clock is hardly too early for a Heineken, is it?

And soon he was planted on the back porch.

Langers with cotton-eyed jaw farting out of a tiny phone speaker at twice the BPM of a human heartbeat.

The Ben Sharman buttoned wrong.

Doc arsing a silk cut purple.

Pretending it wasn't bald thick with the east wind, pretending it wasn't too far gone.

He shuffled and pivoted to the beat, thumb in in the denim pocket, spine erect, as good as ye ever did it, and the Heineken splashed on the wooden decking like rain and woke up the slugs from the earth and the bricks, drolling towards the bosy smell of the hops and the yeast and the sugar for their supper, adoring him, kneading him, wanting him, from above.

Their trails looked like the striations of an anus, and Jope was the hall, line dancing and chalking on fags.

Where did you come from?

Where did you go?

Which one of ye ye gets the salt-eyed jaw?

Jupe sang to the poor old slugs.

He was the centre of attention again, as he plucked one up and dazzled its neck with a shake of salt from the cellar he kept on the windowsill.

The slug dissolved in his fingers and hissed innards from the leather of its khaki skin.

It slushed in his mouth all electric and viscous.

The slug was an oyster now, and Jupe's head was in Heathrow Airport lounge with the Isle Sheikh and Sandra Bullock.

He'd just flogged a block of of apartments to a gobshite in Taramolinos and was negotiating his tongue around Sandra's mouth.

There was talk of a quick fuck in the disabled toilet.

There was the cheesy apple waft of an open bottle of moe on ice and howls of laughter.

They were flying somewhere with a white beach that would take the eyes out of your head.

He felt the piercing yearn for motherly warmth, wrapped in the curious expressions of the airport peasants, devouring this radiant and successful man.

But now young Mary Crawford was there, with red eyes, and she didn't belong here, and her visible sadness was wrecking his buzz, and it stopped being Heathrow Airport Lounge and became a concrete ferry terminal in Ross Lair, full of vending machines.

And suddenly it wasn't an oyster, it was just a fucking slug in his mouth.

And it was giving him the gawks and he said to himself, Jesus Christ, there's a parasite in my body and it's travelling up towards my brain and it will kill me.

And he said to Vincent Melrose, the rat-lung worm, I would have called the child Vincent, you know, regardless of gender.

Jupe heard Vincent Melrose say, Man up, you fucking arsewipe.

That's my name now.

Shut up about it.

And there was no appetite anymore for Heinekens or silk cuts or oysters of the back porch.

No amount of biliray Cyrus could soothe him of the dread that was rising cold on his palms.

He wobbled to the kitchen.

The harsh fluorescent rod of a ceiling light was turned on.

It woke a woodlouse trapped in the plastic of it and projected it on the walls the size of a German shepherd.

Jupe caught sight of his own reflection in the window, the ashen jawline and sinking eyes like the pockets of a pole table.

He tore off the Ben Sharman shirt and let the kitchen see his skin.

It was cold.

I'm a man drowning and waving his arms, he said to himself.

He waved his arms above his head and took in the wind of his armpits.

He splashed on a palmful of jupe aftershave and rubbed it in.

Magnolia sandalwood and onions wafted through the bungalow.

He reached for the mobile to call the office of Dr.

Kylie with the bacon and cabbage face.

As the tone rang, he wished he'd have listened to the doctor's words rather than trying to impress him with the lies he'd pulled out of his arse about the IRA.

But it was late evening now and the doctor's clinic had no answer.

His bowels torn a cade, so he took the goggle.

on the old beige monitor in the parlour to learn about the parasite that was growing inside him now.

The grandmother carpet, bare chest in the chair, with a blue panic illuminating his flesh.

He read about the illness that will take him.

Severe headaches, neck stiffness and fatigue, vomiting, unusual sensations in the skin, such as tickling, tenderness, or burning, paralysis, coma, seizures.

The list of symptoms swung into the front of his head like a soft pink hammer.

The human is a dead-end host for the rat lung worm.

It can't reproduce inside us.

It has nowhere to go, and so it journeys to the meninges of the human brain to die.

Jup thought of his skull as a graveyard and felt the grope of an anxiety attack.

He saw what was ahead of him.

Waking up one freezing morning, paralyzed in the acrylic recliner, no movement or ability to scream for help.

A fixed stare at a greasy gas range, waiting for death by dehydration.

Jupe knew for certain that he would die alone in in the bungalow sometime over the next few months.

And he cursed the slugs of the back porch.

And he cursed Mary Crawford for bringing all of that back at this hour of his life.

What good was there in reminding him of that?

Ferries and tears and tough decisions.

What was the point of that type of thing?

Winter slimed into spring.

The worm crept up his spine.

Sandra Bullock went to heaven.

A slug hadn't been entertained in the bungalow on the porch since the day Mary Crawford called.

And there were sudden jumps of the heart in the silence of night time.

A fright that might be a cousin of guilt.

Notions of contacting her.

To finish the conversation she tried to start on the front porch.

The whole procedure must have meant an awful lot more to her than it did to him if she needed to speak about it at this stage.

It happened so long ago.

Maybe he should listen to her experience of it all.

But when Jup travelled inside himself with questions like that and had to root around the shamus of him, he'd feel a ferocious repulsion.

He'd find the person very deserving of rejection and punishment and disgusting things.

He had separated from himself at some point in his childhood.

He sensed that he was born with a feeling of love.

But it had dried up or shut off, he couldn't remember.

It was as if the very essence of his shamelessness needed to be concealed with a or smell.

And he was in no way comfortable in this interior world.

The sheets of his bed knew him better than he knew himself.

And before anything resembling a feeling of sadness or self-compassion could arise, he'd become angry with the person who had caused this journey of introspection.

And so he'd lie awake until the room was glowing.

And Mary Crawford was only a little slut who shouldn't have let him ride her without a condom in the first place.

And didn't he give her the money at the time to go to Liverpool to get it done?

And hasn't it been made legal since and isn't she doing grand for herself now with a husband and children of her own while poor Jupe has nobody only a parasite climbing up into his brain so fuck Mary Crawford and her memories

on those mornings he'd hunch at the beige dell monitor in the parlour like a bird dipping his beak in the fifth mug of nest cafe with two eyes hanging out of his sockets from tiredness.

He'd read the comments in a rat-long worm support group on Facebook and experience a sense of belonging to someone or something.

The rarity of the disease meant that the Facebook group was small, just a few hundred accounts.

It was a haven for the afflicted and bewildered.

Due to the humidity, Hawaii was ideal for the growth and reproduction of the slugs and rats that serve as hosts for the rat-lung worm parasite.

The majority of the group members resided in the Hawaiian islands.

The page was a place for outpourings of support, camaraderie, links to updates on treatment and pleas for a wider understanding of the disease.

This was a community who didn't feel hard or naughtic.

Juke could never tell if he was experiencing the symptoms or if he was only imagining them.

The years of drink had his bones sore and his skin prickling.

He would post in the mornings under the name Vinnie Melrose and soon grew popular in the group because he was from Ireland.

Ratlung worm was rare in Europe, but not unthinkable due to the warming climate.

He enjoyed being Vinnie Melrose on the Facebook group.

Vinnie Melrose had no reason to think about Mary Crawford and her abortion.

With regular posts, he attained a familiarity with some of the group members, in particular, Skye Riley from Oahu, a divorced woman of 42.

whose 10-year-old son, Aaron, was infected with the parasite.

Skye began to message Jupe.

She was a believer in alternative therapies.

She had always yearned to visit Ireland as her grandfather had come from Kerry.

She found herself drawn to this Vinnie Melrose character.

Skye told him of the great expenses she endured with no insurance under the American health system.

Her little son Aaron required regular pain medication and steroid injections for the inflammation since the parasite had entered his nervous system.

Jupe felt a tenderness towards Skye, a sudden and over-familiar affection, a fantastic obsession that he understood to be love, but it was more of a deep need for connection with himself that he would shine on a person like a torch and call it love.

He began to click on her profile several times a day and pore over the little details of her life.

He would like all of her comments.

He followed the page of the Hibachi restaurant where she worked in Pearl City, Oahu, left an anonymous review praising her table service in a friendly manner.

He ranked her male friends and arranged them into threat levels in his mind.

Skye's ex-husband was a biker, and Jupe imagined sending the continuity IRA to stab him.

He wept over the photos of Aaron before the rat-lung worm destroyed his young life.

He wept over the newer ones, where Aaron had a translucent head like a gasping goldfish, with rings under his eyes that carried an adult sadness.

There was one photograph of Skye and Aaron in their small apartment, with a white tropical beach visible in the distant background.

Skye had strawberry blonde hair and one of those faces that looked like she'd been told two conflicting pieces of information.

But Jupe's eyes could make her look like Sandra Bullock with the right squint.

She wore wooden beads as jewellery, and in another photo, he saw a feather dream catcher hanging in her kitchen.

Sometimes She posted about an amethyst crystal that she needed to keep inside a lead jewelry box because of its power to influence events in her life.

Jope would fantasize about solving all of her problems.

He would imagine providing for her and saving her son's life, marrying her on an ivory beach under a pink sunset in matching linen with those Hawaiian garlands that they have.

Eyes on ice with Moe, line dancing on the sand, while her friends and family envied her and fixated on him, the waves curdling and clacking the round pebbles of the shore like something out of an advert for life insurance.

Jope and Skye would message every day now, not just to talk about rat long worm disease.

Conversation turned to more delicate things, favourite foods, travel, interests.

He would ask her if she remembered line dancing, and she said that she would have been about 12 when it was popular, and that it really wasn't that big of a thing in Hawaii.

But she used to love the backstreet buys.

Emojis emerged.

She'd ask, isn't it 5am in Ireland now, Lol, how do you stay up so late?

She asked him why she was his only Facebook friend and why his profile photo was Garth Brooks and why he didn't post any photos at all.

And he said it was because he kept his disease a secret, that he was a property developer and he was terrified that his investors would get cold feet if they knew he was sick with a parasite.

His property portfolio was situated in different time zones, so he did business at night.

Jup stole photos from from the Facebook page of Dickie Harleigh, the Hyundai salesman, and messaged them to Skye.

Dickie's six-bedroom house with the chandelier in the hallway, his ten acres of land, his pawnee, his speed boat, his face, his new teeth, his full head of hair.

That's me, he said, getting on in year's mind.

Wow, you sound too good to be true, she said.

with a winking emoji.

Surely you have a wife.

Kids?

What are you not telling me, Vinnie?

Winking emoji.

And Jupe said, Oh, Skye, I had a wife, Mary, but she died a few years back.

We have a son in his twenties, also called Vincent, but he's in university now studying to be a bomb disposal expert.

Wow, she said.

I bet he's as handsome as his dad, Lol.

And Jup said, Lol, back.

Do you miss Mary?

How did you guys meet?

Skye asked.

We got pregnant out of wedlock and just got married.

That's how things were back then.

I do miss her.

But you must move on from these painful memories or they will take over your life.

I'm so sorry about this, Vinny.

If it's not too painful to answer, how did she die?

Juke took a few minutes to respond and said, It's okay, Skye.

She was a victim of a terror attack.

A bus she was on exploded.

I don't like to go over the details.

That is heartbreaking, Vinny.

You should be so proud of your son for growing up and becoming a bomb disposal disposal expert.

His mama is looking down on him with a big smile said Skye.

Jupe then offered her money.

He proposed to wire her 1000 Euros to help with Aaron's next round of steroid injections.

Skye took some time to respond.

Jupe felt the terror of abandonment and thought about killing himself.

The next day, Skye declined his offer.

She explained that she didn't feel comfortable accepting the money, but Jupe insisted.

He had just closed a huge deal in Mike and us, sold a condominium he'd developed.

He was feeling very generous and wanted to help her because he could.

It would mean a lot to him if she would allow it.

Skye graciously accepted.

Jupe took 1,000 euros from the fund that was raised for him by Dickie Harleighy.

It was wired via Western Union under the name Vincent Melrose.

Three days later, Skye messaged Jupe a photograph of her and Aaron sharing ice cream in a booth of the restaurant she worked in.

Big guy is killing this Sunday.

Thanks again Vinny.

You've really brought a smile back to his face.

Aaron looked stronger.

He looked like a normal boy of his age, enjoying normal things that boys his age enjoy.

A wave of pleasure and excitement jolted through Jup.

He felt like a decent and worthy person.

He felt like all the change and possibility in the world.

He felt like Bob Geldoff.

He did a little barefoot line dance on the granny carpet in front of his computer monitor.

He noticed the static electricity in his souls.

The fizzy violence of Heineken, hitting the back of the throat, floated into his mind.

He got a notion to buy a crate of it in Aldi.

But now that he'd found love, he wasn't gonna fuck it all away on drink.

He couldn't stop now.

If he slowed down, the worm would make his head explode.

He felt his hands burning as if they were fondling a small fire and experienced his first seizure.

The worm was in his brain.

Skye said that Big Pharma had a cure for rat lung worm disease but they were holding it back so that they could push steroid injections.

Vaccines are actually biological tracking devices created by you know who.

Jupe agreed.

She asked him if he thought about love, if he thought about a future.

and if there was another person in that future.

She asked him how he could be so driven and successful in the property business despite the rat-lung worm growing inside of him.

Jupe told Skye that he lived without any symptoms because he bathed in a holy well at the foot of a mountain near Tharlis, a natural spring where slugs clung to the rocks.

The slugs were said to worship at the feet of the hero Coo Cullen who ate them before battle.

They were blessed by the goddess Bridget and their trails sparkled with stardust from the otherworld.

For thousands of years, people have travelled from all over Ireland to experience the healing power of the slugs and the water in this holy well.

Of course the doctors don't want to admit any of this, he'd say, and you won't read about the well online because this is all local indigenous knowledge that was passed down orally.

He informed Skye that he had no symptoms, no fear, no pain, no headaches, no burning of the skin, no seizures.

The rat-lung worm was still in him, but it was made inert by the satiating water of the holy well.

The worm told him this in a dream.

He had found the cure.

I am living proof of the healing power of the water in the well.

And these words that he pulled out of his hole unfolded before Skye like a soothing blanket.

She messaged him about the photographs on Google of Tharlus in the Tipperary Mountains, how it was like a fairy tale land of grassy glens and dells and hills.

She could imagine the puka and fairies emerging in the morning mist over the magical landscape, long-haired goblins bathing under waterfalls, and white horses galloping into the sea foam and turning into diamonds.

How the ancient Irish were actually aliens who came from a star system called Zeta Reticuli.

How it reminded her of the way her grandfather had described Carrie when she was a child, and Jup said it was exactly like that.

Maybe you and aaron should come here and live with me i have all this space and no one to fill it the long hallways of my house are empty except for the sound of my own footsteps come here to me sky

little aaron can bathe and drink in the waters of the holy well kuckull and slugs can crawl all over him he won't need any more steroid injections He'll be free from the pain and torment like I am.

You and I will get married.

And what about my job, my life, my family?

asked Skye.

And Jupe responded that it was fate that brought them together, and how foolish it would be to ignore the universe when it creates two souls that vibrate at the same frequency, live fully, laugh often, love deeply.

And the voice inside of Skye, which had been sensible at one point in her life, had long been silenced by the terrible pressure and sadness and hardship of of it all.

She'd rather listen to hope, no matter what shape it took.

Before long, the two of them were talking about flights to Ireland.

Skye still had some apprehensions.

She trusted this lovely Irish man named Vinnie Melrose.

He had sent her money, after all.

A faker wouldn't send money like that.

But still,

A niggling caution in her needed more proof.

She suggested that they make video calls.

Jup said that he was too old for that class of technology and it was a miracle he was even able to text her on the Facebook.

Skye was endeared by this response, imagining him as a rugged man of the meadows who spoke with the mountains and the deer.

Skye then intimated the possibility of video sex, hoping that this would entice him to appear on camera and allow her to dispel any small doubts from her mind before she made one of the biggest decisions of her life.

This suggestion made Jupe feel incredibly angry because Skye was pure and perfect with a sick son, not one of these young whores that they have now who show their tits and arseholes on the internet.

He didn't say this to Skye and instead told her that he had been looking at flights from Oahu to Shannon, that there's one in a week and that he'd wire her the money immediately.

That's a lot of money, Vinny, she said.

There's no price tag on this adventure, he said.

You'll fly to Shannon.

It's only a short bus to Tharlis.

And once you get here, ask for the greatest line dancer to ever grace the town.

You'll be shown where to find me.

Lal, said Skye.

You're hilarious, Vincent.

I guess that sounds like a plan.

I can't believe we're actually doing this.

The money was wired.

Young Aaron was informed.

Bags were packed.

At Oahu Airport, Skye bought him a battery power bank for his gaming tablet and one of those foam travel pillows to help with the pain in his neck during the long flight.

She held his fingers like she'd never let them go and kissed his forehead while he slept beside her.

The warm pink sun blessed her face through the oval airplane window and she listened to the hope in her chest.

Her eyes flew out over the Pacific Ocean, across the silver cloud, and swept below the valley lakes, through the purple heather on the mountains of Tarlis, the Aldikar Car Park, slithering down the ivy that clung to the bungalow where Jup lay, firm in his acrylic recliner, the ghost of Coco's paradise, himself and the rat-lung worm in his brain, friend of the slugs in the rain, jupe, wafting through the letterbox, a warm spicy blend with a hint of freshness, complemented by top notes of mandarin and sandalwood, heart notes of tonka bean and scattoll, creating a lingering seductive fragrance.

Right, I wanted to leave that digest with you.

Um I'll catch you next week.

Next week is Science Week.

I'm gonna be speaking to a neuroscientist about the human brain.

Might ask him about

rat lung worm disease.

But uh yeah, Science Week is next week.

There's gonna be lots of fun stuff happening from the 10th of November to the 17th of November all around Ireland.

I do Science Week every year.

And you can go to sfi.ie to find out more about Science Week.

I'll catch you next week.

Rub a dog.

Don't eat a slug.

Put a shell back on a snail.

And paint it like a teenage mutant ninja turtle.

Gen your fleck to a swan.

God bless.

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